Let It Bleed

‘As always, Rankin proves himself the master of his own milieu. He brings the dark underside of Edinburgh deliriously to life … Rankin’s skill lies mainly in the confident way he weaves the disparate threads into a cohesive whole’

‘His novels flow as smoothly as the flooded Forth, and come peppered with three-dimensional characters who actually react to and are changed by events around them … This is Rankin at his raw-edged, page-turning best … With Rankin, you can practically smell the fag-smoke and whisky fumes’

‘A first-rate thriller’

‘The internal police politics and corruption in high places are both portrayed with bone-freezing accuracy. This novel should come with a wind-chill factor warning’

‘Real life and fiction blur in this cynical, bleak tale. You’ll love every second of it’

‘Rankin strips Edinburgh’s polite façade to its gritty skeleton’

‘Rebus is the kind of detective who enjoys a deep dark mystery with a good moral conundrum’

‘Rankin writes laconic, sophisticated, well-paced thrillers’

‘First-rate plotting, dialogue and characterisations’

Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel,
Knots and Crosses
, was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into over thirty languages and are bestsellers worldwide.

Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005 and in 2009 was inducted into the CWA Hall of Fame. In 2004, Ian won America’s celebrated Edgar award for
Resurrection Men
. He has also been shortlisted for the Anthony Awards in the USA, and won Denmark’s
Palle Rosenkrantz
Prize, the French
Grand Prix du Roman Noir
and the
Deutscher Krimipreis
. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Hull and the Open University.

A contributor to BBC2’s
Newsnight Review
, he also presented his own TV series,
Ian Rankin’s Evil Thoughts
. He has received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh. He has also recently been appointed to the rank of Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons. Visit his website at
www.ianrankin.net
.

Cover

Title

Praise for Ian Rankin

About the Author

By Ian Rankin

Acknowledgments

Introduction

One: Bridges

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Two: Shreds

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Three: Zugzwang

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Reading Group Notes

Copyright

Grateful thanks to: Ronnie Mackintosh, for helping me with my inquiries; Councillor Devin Scobie, for steering me through local government; John Mathieson, Staff Training Officer, HM Prison Edinburgh, for his advice; The Scottish Office, especially the Publications Department, New St Andrew’s House; staff of Edinburgh City Chambers; staff of LEEL and Scottish Enterprise; staff of Edinburgh Central Lending Library and the Scottish National Library; Jon for the sofa; and the usual nod to everyone at the Oxford Bar.

All inaccuracies are, of course, my own.

The lines quoted by Mrs Kennedy are from
The New Testament in Scots
, translated by W. L. Lorimer (Penguin, 1985).

Avarice, the spur of industry.

The more sophisticated readers simply repeated the Italian proverb, ‘If it isn’t true, it’s to the point.’

Without women, life is a pub.

I first heard the Rolling Stones album
Let It Bleed
when I was only ten or eleven years old. I didn’t like the music – at that age I was listening to Marc Bolan and not much else; it was my sister’s boyfriend who was the Stones fan. I did find the lyrics intriguing, however. Even though I barely understood the references, I could tell that there was something ‘dirty’ about them. They hinted at sex, debauchery, violence and drugs. There was even one song (‘Midnight Rambler’) which seemed to be about a real-life serial killer. I eventually had to buy the album for myself.

By this time, however, I was in my twenties and had already written a couple of books. I was also working as a music journalist and hi-fi equipment reviewer in London.
Let It Bleed
, with its fantastic studio sound, soon became a constant on my Linn Sondek, and when the time came, in 1994, to write the seventh John Rebus novel, I felt emboldened to borrow the album’s title.

Though the book is set in the depths of an Edinburgh winter, it was written at my house in south-west France, mostly in blazing summer heat. (I’d long since given up the hi-fi job, but still used the Linn record deck.) I’m not sure now if working on the book provided me with some sort of internal air-conditioning, but one thing I knew was that during any cold snap in Edinburgh you would want your central heating to be working. Hence the pun in the title – what Rebus really needs to bleed in the book is a radiator.

For a little while in the 1990s, I became convinced that in order to make a decent amount of money I would have to transfer my skills to television. I had already made several attempts at scripts for the established cop show
The Bill
. At meetings with the production team, I learned that each
Bill
script had to contain three scenarios, and that none of the action could involve the cops’ private lives or show them off-duty. Somehow I couldn’t stick to this formula. At around the same time, television had shown some interest in Rebus. I attended more meetings, this time with the BBC, and tried writing a few scripts (both adaptations and original stories), but seemed to hit a series of walls. Eventually, I started pitching non-Rebus ideas at my TV contacts, but still to no avail. All of which, however, may go some way towards explaining the slam-bang action opening of
Let It Bleed
. It’s still something I’d love to see on the big screen, done Hollywood-style: a night-time car chase in a blizzard, with the Forth Road Bridge beckoning. Fantastic.

Let It Bleed
was a political novel, in that it used local and national politics for much of its plotting. By this time I had a real-life detective on my side, a fan of the books who had pointed out various procedural errors in previous stories. And with a few published novels under my belt, I was a known commodity in Edinburgh, so could approach complete strangers (council officials, for example) with a view to aiding my research. On my trips back to Edinburgh for
Let It Bleed
, I slept on a friend’s sofa, asked a lot of questions at the reception desks of various government agencies, and bought a few lunches and rounds of drinks. In some ways, the new book would be a return to the Edinburgh of my second novel,
Hide
Seek
. Both stories are concerned with the changing face of Edinburgh, its
attempts to embrace new employment opportunities (meaning new technologies) while still retaining a sense of identity. Structural change to Scotland’s capital was already under way: there was a plan for one of the breweries to open a theme park near the Palace of Holyrood. Eventually, the site would house Our Dynamic Earth and the Scottish Parliament instead, but at the time I was filled with a sense of glee: a theme park built on booze! Well, why not? Several city landmarks, including the Usher Hall, had been built with cash from brewing dynasties. The least we could do in the late twentieth century was celebrate our national relationship with alcohol: hence the use of a favourite Martin Amis line at the very start of the book: ‘Without women, life is a pub.’